Gen Alpha joins the chat 💀, the first Word of the Year for 2023 🤖, three new accents in southern England 💂
Welcome to the latest instalment of English in Progress, the newsletter that keeps you updated on the English language. Fresh in your inbox every second Friday. (Ish.)
My name is Heddwen Newton. I am a translator and English teacher. I love discovering all the ways English is spoken, the ways in which it is used by different generations and by people from all over the world.
Best of the month
Goodbye Cockney and Queen’s English: Three new accents for the south-east of England
New research from Amanda Cole shows that in a sample of 193 people between the ages of 18 and 33 from across south-east England and London, the accents that emerged were a quarter estuary English, a quarter multicultural London English and half Standard southern British English. YouTube clips with celebrity speakers of each accent are supplied in the article. The results have seen a lot of media coverage in the UK, with the Guardian’s Pass Notes doing a humorous piece about it. A great place to look if you would like to know more about the study itself is Language Hat’s comment section.
The Conversation (UK)
Helping smart speakers to understand African American English
Research has shown that a lot of automatic speech recognition technology, or ASR, doesn't work well for underrepresented accent groups, like the Black community. Howard University and Google are building an African American English speech dataset that will also be available to others looking to improve speech technology.
NPR (USA)
Does the average woman apologize 295,650 times in her lifespan?
I love linguistics, and I love fact checking, so I was thrilled to find this blog post which does some linguistics fact checking! “Women apologise 295,650 times over the course of their lives” is a zombie fact that has been doing the rounds for a while now. It originates from, get this, a flower company. Great research done by Debuk, a.k.a. Debbie Cameron.
Debuk (blog; UK)
Gen Zalpha slang
Gen Alpha has joined the chat, everybody. In my monitoring of next-gen slang, the generation with birth years from 2010 has suddenly started cropping up everywhere. So my category “Gen Z slang” will from now on read “Gen Zalpha slang”. Click on the word to see where I got it from.
💀 (skull emoji) - this emoji has replaced 😂 as the acceptable way to indicate laughter. “I laughed so hard I died”. (In use since the early 2020s according to KnowYourMeme)
bop - a promiscuous female (derogatory) (on Urban Dictionary since 2005)
canon event - an unpleasant yet inevitable life event that eventually helps one build character (on Urban Dictionary since 2023)
do it for the plot - taking a risk to make life more exciting (on Urban Dictionary since 2022)
to drag someone - to roast someone or to tell them off “She’s clearly wrong. Drag her!” (on Urban Dictionary since 2011)
dupe - an alternative version, a knock-off. Short for duplicate. “This Target purse is a Gucci dupe.” (Not on Urban Dictionary with this definition, but other online sources confirm the definition.)
fanum tax - Gen Alpha slang. Used to jokingly justify taking something that belongs to someone else. Person 1: "You took my food." Person 2: "Fanum tax." (25 definitions on Urban Dictionary, ALL from 2023)
he’s him/ she’s her - that person is the greatest “Did you see how he stopped that ball? He’s him!” (On Urban Dictionary since 2022; “she’s her” not yet on Urban Dictionary)
to pop off - to go crazy (On Urban Dictionary since 2019)
side eye — a disapproving look that is verbalized by saying “side eye.” “Talking behind coworkers’ backs? That’s a definite side eye.” (On Urban Dictionary since 2007, though that is about “giving someone the side eye”)
skibidi - Gen Alpha slang for people who are bad. The terms comes from an animated YouTube series called Skibidi Toilet that followed a group of bizarre creatures who lived in toilets that were trying to take over the world (what?) (On Urban Dictionary since 2023, though as yet without a definition)
starter girlfriend - a throwaway partner to gain relationship experience (on Urban Dictionary since 2023)
thirst trap - a photo posted on social media intended to evoke strong desire from its viewers (on Urban Dictionary since 2011)
Words of the Year
Collins Dictionary is the first each year to announce their WOTY (that’s “Word of the Year”). For 2023 they have chosen “AI”. Other contenders were “greedflation”, defined as “the use of inflation as an excuse to raise prices to artificially high levels in order to increase corporate profits”, “debanking”, “the act of depriving a person of banking facilities”, and “nepo baby”, the term used to describe the sons and daughters of celebrities whose careers are assumed to have taken off thanks to their famous parent. This columnist on iNews thinks the runners-up show a picture of a self-obsessed people.
The South African word of the year, as chosen by the Pan South African Language Board, is ‘Russia-Ukraine’. ‘Kuningi’ is South Africa’s social media word of the year. Kuningi is an isiZulu word that means ‘it’s a lot’ and is frequently used by social media users to express feeling overwhelmed with too much information or dealing with multiple challenges at once.”
Neologisms of the month
The neologisms below were sourced from the Cambridge Dictionary New Words blog, “field X buzzwords”-type lists, and stuff I noticed myself. My admittedly subjective criterion for words to make the list is that they seemed new and interesting to me. Click on the word for my source.
data poisoning tool - a tool that messes up training data in ways that could cause serious damage to image-generating AI models
groundhogging - the act of dating the same type of person again and again, even though it never ends in a successful relationship
rage farming - the activity of posting content on social media that aims to make the reader angry and then share the content with other users
screen apnoea - the situation where someone stops breathing properly when they are looking at the screen of their mobile phone or similar device
smishing - phishing via SMS text messages
traumedy - a type of comedy that involves someone talking about past traumatic events in their life in a funny way
vishing- phishing via telephone (“voice phishing”)
The shifting meaning of words
Brits don’t mind speaking American English
A great enumeration of Americanism in British English by Peter Trudgill (if you haven’t heard of him, he is what I would call a Big Name in linguistics). Trudgill is of the opinion that if Brits don’t make a fuss about Americanisms in their English, then Americans shouldn’t make a fuss about Britishisms in theirs. “These days Britons eat brownies, cookies and fries. And it is very hard to buy a bun these days – what you get are muffins. Some of us don’t go to the pictures or cinema but to the movies. Quite a lot of British people experience goosebumps rather than goose flesh or goose pimples. Blokes and chaps have become guys. Schoolchildren are no longer pupils but students. And more and more, we give gifts rather than presents.”
What does “out of pocket” mean?
One of the main trending topics a few weeks ago, (well, if you’re a word-nerd like me, anyway) was the varying definitions of the term “out of pocket”. To me as a Brit, this term has to do with money. It either means you have to pay for expenses from your own money (and will hopefully be reimbursed later). “Management seemed to have forgotten about my need to eat, so I had to pay for all my meals out of pocket.” Or it means that you have lost money, or have no more money to spend. “The pair was left out of pocket after having to pay for unexpected healthcare costs.”
For older Americans, the term can mean that you cannot be reached for a while. “I have a dentist appointment, so I’ll be out of pocket this afternoon.”
Now, there’s a new meaning in town. For Gen Z English speakers, “out of pocket” means something that's inappropriate, out of character or unacceptable. “Never say that again. That was so out of pocket.”
The best article is the Ben Zimmer one in the Wall Street Journal. Other articles here, here, and here.
Is it spelled “Whoa!” or “Woah!”?
Both spellings have been around for centuries. Either could have prevailed. And neither is the original spelling. James Harbeck takes us by the hand and explains it all.
Female words go bad when male ones don’t
Pejoration is the name applied to good words going bad. In English, there is a concerning tendency for gendered terms, and female appellations in particular, to be seen as negative. The term “witch,” for example, has a lot more baggage than its male counterpart “warlock". English has terms like the shrewish “fishwife” or the heartless “ice queen” but no “fish-husband” or “ice king,” and so on.
Should We Accept ‘Commentate’ as a Verb?
If you’re into sports, entertainment, politics or the news you will encounter commentators all the time. And that word, “commentator,” has been around since the 1400s without much fuss. However, the verb “commentate” gets people riled up. Grammar girl found that only 25% of Facebook respondents thought it was okay to use, but, incredibly, Garner’s Modern English Usage accepts it.
Dictionary to explain digital jargon to boomers
Susie Dent helped write a short dictionary (available as a free PDF in the article) that explains digital terms for those that don’t understand them. The dictionary is simple and well-written; something to print out for parents, grandparents or friends if you think they might need it. The article lists “the top 30 online jargon older people don’t understand” (I had to look up the top two; they are in my neologism list above.)
100 years ago, linguists were fine with using words like “superior”
I loved this time-machine piece from The Times (UK), which featured a letter from 26 October 1923. The letter-writer makes some good points, but with shocking superiority and disdain. “Nor must it be forgotten that speech is never stationary; it is subject to an unceasing evolution, and the educated accent of one century is not that of another. [When] boys speak vilely to one another, or even to their linguistic superiors, that is in itself no reason for utter pessimism.”
Podcasts
In defence of bad movie accents
Lots of clips of “bad” movie accents in this episode of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute (transcript available in link)
Season 4 of Subtitle has started
Subtitle, sponsored by The Linguistic Society of America, tells stories about linguistics and language. I like the podcast for its high, documentary-style editing standard, and am happy that they have now started their fourth season.
Three minority Englishes: Standard Deviations
I missed this little three-part Australian podcast last summer, but I am thoroughly charmed, so I am going to go ahead and recommend it now: student Nicola Brayan does an excellent job interviewing specialists and speakers of Australian Aboriginal English, Singlish and African-American English, respectively.
World Englishes - vocab
The different varieties of English as spoken all around the world are known to academics as “World Englishes”. In this section, I highlight some words and terms from the richness of the English-speaking world that came to my attention in the past month. Click on the word to get more information. Tip: see if you can find your own English variety below. Find out which words seem normal to you, but strange to others!
airish - Appalachian English (USA) for “chilly, cool” (particularly nice article about Appalachian culture, this one)
divvy - Scouse (Liverpool English, UK) for “idiotic person”
GUBU - this Irish English acronym stands for grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented
hacky - Northumbrian English (UK) for “dirty”
Jesus Murphy - Canadian English for ‘Jesus Christ’
nibblies - Australian English for snacks
to salvage - Philippine English for “to apprehend and execute (a suspected criminal) without trial”
Newbie reads
These articles give good explanations for newbie linguists.
How come Britain has so many regional accents compared to the US?
“English has been around a lot longer in Britain. Because a lot of the population wasn't very mobile, there were people who were staying for generations in more or less the same place. (...) By comparison, English was initially spread across North America in a much more sweeping and actively mobile fashion.” This well-written piece with background information also includes links to some of the latest information on accents.
“Marriage language” explained
The TikTok marriage language trend, where couples share the special words they have for things, is given a proper explanation in this Dazed article by linguist Tony Thorne.
What Makes a New Word Successful?
Nancy Friedman discusses why the American Dialect Society’s first Word of the Year (1990, bushlips, “insincere political rhetoric.”) was so off the mark, and why a word like “rizz”, which was first used only two years ago, is so successful. The secret, apparently, is FUDGE: Frequency of use, Unobtrusiveness, Diversity of users and situations, Generation of other forms and means, and Endurance of the concept.
Is there a right way to speak English?
From a linguistic perspective (as in, coming from the discipline that studies language), there is nothing better or worse about any particular accent, compared to any other. Posh English is not better than Mancunian, or Liverpudlian, or Glaswegian, it is simply different. (Mostly interesting for people who speak, or know a lot about, UK English.)
World English
Should Jamaican Patois become Jamaica’s national language?
For DailyKos, Denise Oliver Velez gives a great overview of the discussion in Jamaica right now about naming Patois, or Patwah, as an official language. Jamaican Patois is an English-based creole language with West African, Taino, Irish, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Chinese and German influences. Video examples in the article.
The Yorkshire dialect
Journalist Lucy Denyer actually took the Yorkshire Dialect course discussed in the last newsletter. There are no hard numbers on how many people use Yorkshire dialect, and it’s even harder to know how many people can truly understand it in its broadest form. Yorkshire is enormous, and the population sits at around 5.5 million. So while it’s not its own language, such as Welsh, nurturing its idiosyncrasies and keeping its roots alive is clearly in the interest of many. The Yorkshire Test in the article is, unfortunately, only accessible if you have a subscription to the UK Telegraph.
New Northumbrian English dictionary
A new dictionary compiled by the Northumbrian Language Society, called the Northumbrian Wordhoard (isn’t that lovely?) contains 1,250 of the commonest Northumbrian dialect words with their meanings. Northumbrian English is spoken in Northumberland, Tyneside and North West Durham; that’s all the way up in the north-east of England.
English in Finland
The abundant use of English does not threaten the position of the Finnish language, according to a study by the University of Eastern Finland.
Academia
New Book: For F*ck's Sake; Why Swearing is Shocking, Rude, and Fun
Why do we love to swear so much? Why do we get so offended when others do it? With wit and insight, philosopher Rebecca Roache seeks answers to these and other puzzling questions about bad language.
New book: The Routledge Handbook of Pronouns
This original volume provides the first state-of-the-art overview of research on pronouns in the 21st century. It has dedicated sections on grammar, history, and change, language learning/acquisition, cognition and comprehension, power, politics, and identity. The Handbook is designed to encourage readers to engage with a range of perspectives from within and beyond their immediate areas of interest, with the ultimate aim of shaping the future trajectory of interdisciplinary, multiingual research on pronouns.
New book: Comparative Variation Analysis: Grammatical Alternations in World Englishes
The field of variation studies is at risk of fragmenting into different research communities with different foci. This pioneering book addresses this by establishing a canon of state-of-the-art quantitative methods to analyze grammatical variation from a comparative perspective. It explains how to use these methods to investigate large datasets in a responsible fashion.
New book: English as a Lingua Franca in the Language Classroom; Applying Theory to ELT Practice
A guide for understanding, envisioning, and acting on the lessons of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) research in English Language Teaching (ELT) classrooms. With close attention to the nuts and bolts of teaching – as well as useful features for further investigation, discussion, and application – this book will be a helpful, practical resource for current and prospective English language teachers, teacher trainers and mentors, and curriculum designers.
New book: Language Ideologies and the Vernacular in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia
This book probes into how we might move beyond the English-vernacular binary in India, explores what happened to “bhasha literatures” during the colonial and post-colonial periods and how to position those literatures by the side of Indian English and international literature. It looks into the ways vernacular community and political rhetoric are intertwined with Anglophone (national or global) positionalities and their roles in political processes.
New book: English as a Medium of Instruction in South Asia; Issues in Equity and Social Justice
This book examines the ‘English mania phenomenon’ and the complex circumstances of adopting English Medium Instruction (EMI) by South Asian education systems and the effect of an uneven distribution of resources on the already under-resourced countries in the region.
New corpus of Chinese-based Asian Englishes
The CCAE is the first and largest open-access web-crawled corpus for Chinese Englishes and Chinese-based Asian Englishes, to wit: Chinese mainland English, Hong Kong English, Macao English, Taiwan English, Malaysia English and Singapore English. Apparently they used NLP (Natural Language Processing) technology to make it, I didn’t understand that bit, but good for them!
English as Lingua Franca speakers are developing their own collocations
English as Lingua Franca speakers appear to be developing their own communication norms, characterized by specific lexical associations and formulaic expressions that are distinct from those found in native English language usage, and similar for people non-native speakers from various linguistic and cultural backgrounds. This study looks at collocations with the verbs see, look, hear, listen, watch, and feel.
From printed to digital: why do dictionaries still condense information?
Lexicographic textual condensation refers to the practice of abbreviating terms like “verb” in a dictionary, which was done to save space when dictionaries were still printed. Teresa Fuentes Morán looks at how modern digital dictionaries do this, and argues that, even though the digital medium means they have all the space in the world, condensation still makes sense, because it helps people find the information they need quickly and easily.
Southern English diverges from Northern-centric views on English
This chapter examines the use of English in Bangladeshi schools, challenging the World Englishes (WE) paradigm. It highlights the emergence of unique "Southern" ways of using English, influenced by local contexts and perspectives. By analyzing school websites, the chapter demonstrates how English is employed for both practical and cultural purposes, diverging from traditional Northern-centric views of the language.
Central vowels of Pakistani English
This research delves into the acoustic properties of central vowels in Pakistani English with the objective of scrutinizing their distinctive features. 40 native Punjabi speakers were used. The findings indicate that these speakers do not consistently differentiate between /ə/ and /ɜ:/, while they do maintain a distinct pronunciation of /ᴧ/ as a separate vowel sound.
This study shows the dominance of English in Ghanaian education, despite the benefits of local languages. Educators acknowledge the importance of Ghanaian languages for early education, but pressures for English proficiency prevail due to its perceived role in academic and career success. Indigenous languages are often relegated to cultural contexts.
How do lecturers in the UK view native-speaker norms in academic writing?
I have a few gripes about this study (because what is the difference, for the respondents, between “correct English” and “native English”?) The summary of responses from lecturers to the question if they require native-like English was interesting, though, with most contesting that it isn’t a requirement at all.
And finally…
The internet is going crazy over Gen Alpha slang right now, with terms like “skibidi”, “gyat” and “rizzler” getting lots of airtime. In this case, via serenade. I explain a few of the terms in this video in my list above, this article explains the rest.
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The number of mistakes in this newsletter is directly proportionate to the number of times my three-year-old woke me up last night. If you want to give me any feedback, you can use the comment button below, or hit reply to send me an email.
Excellent roundup! Very timely and comprehensive (not just because I'm mentioned).